Reading The Word Exchange<\/em> against the backdrop of the protracted business negotiations between Hachette Book Group and online retailer Amazon.com, and the extended public debate surrounding those negotiations, gave Alena Graedon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s debut novel an extra layer of frisson. The story is set in a near-future Manhattan where our lives have become \u00e2\u20ac\u0153slowly bereft of books and love letters, photographs and maps, takeout menus, liner notes, and diaries.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Instead, we have Memes: ubiquitous electronic devices that are like personal digital assistants, smartphones, and tablet computers rolled into one. They can even administer sleeping medication in small doses.<\/p>\n One of the companies that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s profiting off our dependence on Memes, Synchronic, has been buying the rights to the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dictionaries, building up towards a monopoly of meaning in which their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Word Exchange\u00e2\u20ac\u009d would be the only way to get the definition of an unfamiliar word\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 for a price. (And once that monopoly is secure, of course, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nothing would prevent Synchronic from adjusting the price of words up.) The two major holdouts are the real-life Oxford English Dictionary and the fictional North American Dictionary of the English Language; the story begins when Anana, the daughter of the North American Dictionary\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s editor, discovers that her father has vanished under mysterious circumstances. As she searches for him, she learns about the Synchronic plot, which turns out to be much grander, and much more sinister, than simply owning the language. <\/p>\n The dystopia of The Word Exchange<\/em> isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t rooted in catastrophic natural disasters or blindly destructive wars, but it does take on an increasingly apocalyptic tone as the Memes begin to spread a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153word flu\u00e2\u20ac\u009d across New York and then further out. When one person begins to lose his or her grasp on language, as Anana does to some extent and other characters do at a much deeper level, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an intimate crisis; when that loss begins to spread across society, Graedon suggests, chaos probably won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take too long to kick in. The novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s paranoid undercurrent works well in conjunction with the extended symbolic framework based on Lewis Carroll\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Alice in Wonderland<\/em>, imbuing Anana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s search with a vibe somewhat reminiscent of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc80s cyberpunk—a world where technology is as likely to reinforce our worst tendencies as it is to improve our lives. Yet while Graedon may invoke a variant of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Internet makes us stupid\u00e2\u20ac\u009d argument over the course of Anana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quest, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not her final answer. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just that our modes of reading and thinking are changing through new usage patterns, after all, but that those usage patterns are being cynically manipulated by media conglomerates (and aspiring conglomerates). <\/p>\n Going by that, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to read Graedon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s story as an anti-Amazon allegory—particularly, as noted above, at a moment when (some) people are increasingly inclined to take a critical look at Amazon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way of doing business with the publishing industry, in the same way that the language lovers of the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s semi-underground Diachronic Society explicitly define themselves in opposition to Synchronic. Maybe too easy. You want—I want, anyway—a novel to do something beyond fire buckshot at the side of a distribution center-sized barn, and I think The Word Exchange<\/em> does have more to it, starting with Graedon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s love of words and language in all their complexity and ambiguity. Chances are you already share that love if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re picking up this novel in the first place—whether you do or not, though, Graedon couches her philosophical argument for that love in an effectively suspenseful plot that keeps us invested not just in Anana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s search for her father, but her ability to resist succumbing to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153word flu\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as it wreaks its havoc on the world around her.<\/p>\n (NOTE: This post originally appeared on Beacon<\/b>.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reading The Word Exchange against the backdrop of the protracted business negotiations between Hachette Book Group and online retailer Amazon.com, and the extended public debate surrounding those negotiations, gave Alena Graedon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s debut novel an extra layer of frisson. The story is set in a near-future Manhattan where our lives have become \u00e2\u20ac\u0153slowly bereft of books […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[965],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4008"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4009,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4008\/revisions\/4009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}